Mirror Eyes: Explainable Human-Robot Interaction at a Glance

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robot system with reflective eyes that enhances human awareness and detection of robot actions during interaction, improving user experience and error recognition.

Contribution

The work presents a novel eye-mirroring mechanism for robots that visually reflects attention regions, improving transparency and interaction quality in human-robot collaboration.

Findings

Participants detected errors earlier with reflective eyes.

User experience ratings increased when eye mirroring was enabled.

Participants felt more aware of the robot's information processing.

Abstract

The gaze of a person tends to reflect their interest. This work explores what happens when this statement is taken literally and applied to robots. Here we present a robot system that employs a moving robot head with a screen-based eye model that can direct the robot's gaze to points in physical space and present a reflection-like mirror image of the attended region on top of each eye. We conducted a user study with 33 participants, who were asked to instruct the robot to perform pick-and-place tasks, monitor the robot's task execution, and interrupt it in case of erroneous actions. Despite a deliberate lack of instructions about the role of the eyes and a very brief system exposure, participants felt more aware about the robot's information processing, detected erroneous actions earlier, and rated the user experience higher when eye-based mirroring was enabled compared to non-reflective eyes. These results suggest a beneficial and intuitive utilization of the introduced method in cooperative human-robot interaction.